I completely agree…what’s the rush, everyone? You havin a kid? Chasin a crook? Late for…nothing?

They give me hope that there can someday be peace between cyclists and drivers. Their other videos are really quite impressive as well.

You generalize. I do it every single day.

This involves a high level of awareness, that I don’t know can actually be taught. But for me at least that is the potential beauty of riding a bike.

Tourists – in particular those who don’t ride in their home countries – will invariably contribute to some problems, but also don’t want to sit around and take a cycling safety class.

The best thing we can do for them is to make their experience as soft as possible, e.g. banning cars, e.g. “We love tourists and don’t want to see them get hurt, so we are banning private cars in the City”, says the Mayor, increasing profits to hotels, restaurants and Amtrak.

I worked at a bike rental company at the Wharf/N.Beach in 2000 and we had very few tourist crashes. Probably car rental operators see more incidents relative to amount of use but of course their customers have shells.

What do you refer to as your “tiny car”? I will venture to imagine that it is orders of magnitudes heavier than the bulkiest touring bicycles, and thus able to create much greater havoc if you do make a mistake. It also gives you a lot more protection than a bike. With larger vehicles comes larger responsibility. Which by the way is another reason your analogy falls flat. Big rig drivers in my experience do tend to focus when driving on city streets more than your run of the mill minivan driver. There are exceptions, but the ones I encounter usually drive slowly on busy streets and are alert. In contrast, these days I’m now almost shocked when I see a driver in a minivan *not* busy texting or checking iPhone or whatever.

I do not like to run red lights or make a sport out of it. If at an intersection there would be a stoplight for bikes which would give us 10-20 sec of headway before letting cars through, I would obey it. That’s all it would take. Of course, car drivers would never agree to wait a few seconds longer in order to keep everyone safer.

Should I run the red light because I want to put as much space between my tiny car and the big rig behind me? I mean, if one of those things hits me, I’m dead.

I will second your opinion about tourist riders. After a friend shattered her arm after collided with a French tourist paying no mind to what side of the road she was on, yapping with her kids behind her, it’s clear to me that the bike rental companies in SF need to be A LOT MORE proactive about educating their customers about common road rules and SF cycling realities.

This really can’t be left to a waiver of liability, multilingual pamphlets with diagrams and a 3 question quiz (oral) completed (not about correct/incorrect, but about getting customers to stop and think, and actually read the brochure) should be a regular part of doing business.

Regarding Berlin, be careful what you wish for:

* Many separated cycling paths are in former pedestrian-priority space on busier streets which have done nothing to reduce space for automobiles (no “road diet”). Fortunately in Berlin, unlike many other German cities, there is generally no requirement to ride on the cycle path.

* Many of the immigrant cyclists (really, mostly from Europe and N. America) have no skills, training or experience. Their lack of these things combined with laziness about enforcing pedestrian space means many ride on the pavement (sidewalk), not even using their bells, etc. I only mention this because I wonder if SFBC or other groups in the Bay Area have a proactive cycle-training program for newbie cyclists. By “pro-active” I mean things like they tell you about a class when you start new phone or other utility service, or get a library card… or that an employer is required to give you training if you want it. I have a vague understanding that this is part of the assimilation protocol in the Netherlands; I feel it something Berlin (and Germany) really needs. (I do not mean that a license will be required.)

I think that people think that it is mainly tourists doing all sorts of wacky things, but I am not sure this is the case. Also making it worse is that many people have crappy bikes with thin tyres not suited to the not infrequent cobblestones around here… so, again, they ride on the pavement because it is more comfortable FOR THEM. (I suppose the equivalent in SF would be really good brakes?).

“I know you are writing about biking in a different, much more care dominant reality, but I just can’t embrace the kind of bike culture you seem to promote.”

All solutions are local. I think it’s grand that Copenhagen now has the facilities for a bicycle culture that the majority of your people demand. But consider what it took to get to that point, the political will, the steps, experiments, and corrections along the way. San Francisco, for all of its cycling popularity, is still in the nascent steps, where the bicycling culture is overlaid with athletic, individualistic, combative, fatalistic, and class values.

In the end, despite the feuding, there’s actually wide agreement about the end objective. Drivers don’t generally want to mow down cyclists, and cyclists prefer safety of law and facilities. Cyclists and drivers both generally want and need a good public transit network.

But to get to that end is a chicken-and-egg situation. SF will not get segregated bike boulevards until a plurality of road users demand it, over the objections of parochial interests unwilling to compromise. In tiny SF, those interests range from shopkeepers, to multinational corporations, to residents rich and poor, owners and renters – all of them have valid concerns, and a few have no concern other than pure obstruction. How do you get the plurality? By going through the epically slow process of getting paint on asphalt to attract the numbers of existing and new cyclists to use, to learn better road rules, to demonstrate to new neighbors what is possible and mutually beneficial, and to demand the steady improvements until we get our own version of ‘Copenhagen’ with hills.

The only forces like to accelerate this pattern are seismic, and historically in my city, that means a rebuild that is usually entirely undemocratic, which probably won’t be bike-friendly. Chinatown’s history is instructive in this scenario.

‘But if biking is to be a true alternative it must ALSO BE FRIENDLY for children and old people’

‘It must ALSO be for careful, middle-aged women like me’

‘I know you are writing about biking in a different, much more CAR dominant reality’

I live in Copenhagen, Denmark – a city where approximately 36% of the population uses bikes as their main form of transportation to and from work. It is my experience, that if biking really has chance of being a sustainable transportation alternative it must be a safe alternative, otherwise most people understandably won’t embrace it.

Of course, a major part of safety is making the kind of bike infrastructure investements that we have here, like elevated bike paths that are seperate from the street (not the bogus solutions like in many U.S. cities that consists of painting a line and that’s it), where necessary separate traffic lights for bikes and cars, parking facilities and other details I won’t go into here.

But if biking is to be a true alternative it must children and old people – and completely seriously, I think it is important to set a safety example for children when biking, liking not blazing through red lights. It must be for careful, middle-aged women like me that has stopped biking to work during *rush* hours (I have the priveldge og being able to walk to work in 50 minutes) because I couldn’t take the stress ofof the all to often near, serious accidents because of reckless, impatient cyclists.

Actually, I think we nedd to slow down and take it is easy much more in life. I know you are writing about biking in a different, much more care dominant reality, but I just can’t embrace the kind of bike culture you seem to promote.

Deborah

I hope that someday our laws will reflect this reality.

One clarification I’m sure you didn’t intend to omit:

“not always remembering that there might be a cyclist [or pedestrian] doing the same thing from our right or left.”

I grew up on Shotwell Street, and I love that it’s quiet and the traffic is relatively slow. And I love that more and more of that traffic is on bikes. But what I really love is that it feels safe to cross the street as a pedestrian, and that safety depends on cyclists being aware of and prepared to stop for pedestrians.

But while riding my motorcycle, I’ve nearly been clobbered half a dozen times by some insane cyclist running a stop or ignoring a red light. If people want to plant themselves across the hood of a car or plowing into me on my bicycle, it ruins my afternoon. Someone slamming me while I’m on my motorcycle is going to get me seriously hurt and is utterly non-consensual.

Please people, don’t forget us the poor motorcyclist, who is going to get fucked up by insane biking. “Share the road” is the call of the bicyclist, but there are too many assholes out there who want to own the whole road and are willing to take the rest of us down their darwin-hole with them.

When you’re going to do something against the traffic rules, at least slow the fuck down!

Golden age of cycling? Anarchy? Only works if you don’t care about anyone else.